On the Role of Routing in Named Data Networking

On the Role of Routing in Named Data Networking
by Cheng Yi, Jerald Abraham, Alexander Afanasyev, Lan Wang, Beichuan Zhang, and Lixia Zhang
ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN), September 2014.

A unique feature of Named Data Networking (NDN) is that its forwarding plane can detect and recover from network faults on its own, enabling each NDN router to handle network failures locally without relying on global routing convergence. This new feature prompts us to re-examine the role of routing in an NDN network: does it still need a routing protocol? If so, what impact may an intelligent forwarding plane have on the design and operation of NDN routing protocols? Through analysis and extensive simulations, we show that routing protocols remain highly beneficial in an NDN network. Routing disseminates initial topology and policy information as well as long-term changes in them, and computes the routing table to guide the forwarding process. However, because the forwarding plane is capable of detecting and recovering from failures quickly, routing no longer needs to handle short-term churns in the network. Freeing routing protocols from short-term churns can greatly improve their scalability and stability, enabling NDN to use routing protocols that were previously viewed as unsuitable for real networks.